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Politics and Poetics 3. The poetics of empire: Virgil’s Aeneid. The politics of form/narrative : EPIC. Competing /interacting media: writing and song Epic projects cultural prestige, power, authority: does the genre therefore tend to (re)produce political conservatism?
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Politics and Poetics 3 The poetics of empire: Virgil’s Aeneid
The politics of form/narrative: EPIC • Competing/interacting media: writing and song • Epic projects cultural prestige, power, authority: does the genre therefore tend to (re)produce political conservatism? • Callimacheanismvs classicism: the non-purity of genre
The politics of content E.g.: the unification of Italy and Rome (bks7-12); the Punic wars (bk4); the battle of Actium (bks1, 8); the prophecy of Anchises (bk6); the shield of Aeneas (bk8)… Bear in mind: • Augustus as an ‘idea’ • Power as diffuse • Literature as performative/productive rather than simply ‘representative’ of politics • The nature of poetic language • The politics of theAeneidas inseparable from the politics of reading the poem, and from the politics of its reception.
Aeneid 8.306-61 • Look at how the poet highlights both difference and continuity between past and present. • What might an ‘optimistic’ and a ‘pessimistic’ reading of this passage look like?